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When you get to camp, the deck and aluminum extension bars turn into a large table for cooking and food prep. The Wingman turns a canoe into a really stable mother ship, capable of carrying fresh food and cold drinks, and accommodating large dogs or standing anglers. Who really wants the raft and all the fussiness it calls for anyway?

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Jackson Kayak Tip of the Week By Zofia Tula Flatwater paddling allows us to focus on the small things, which in turn improves our freestyle kayaking. I think this is especially true for women who have a harder time covering up improper technique with strength. And all paddlers can benefit from learning symmetry and proper

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By Sam Boykin While visiting Charlotte, N.C., this summer, 18-year-old Lauren Seitz, along with several other members of the Westerville, Ohio, church choir, decided to check out the U.S. National Whitewater Center (USNWC). The sprawling outdoor sports complex has mountain bike trails, rock climbing walls and ziplines. But the main attraction is the Class IV

Cache La Bayou, Arkansas

Cache La Bayou, Arkansas

The best thing about searching for a formerly extinct bird is that it can force you out of your comfort zone. Take Bayou DeView, for example, or any of the other adjacent bayous, swamps, and sloughs within the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in east-central Arkansas. This heretofore all-but-ignored refuge, which preserves a fraction of the dark emerald forests that once carpeted the bottomlands of America’s broad southern rivers, suddenly went viral when an ivory-billed woodpecker was reportedly sighted here about a decade ago—the first time that this most iconic of birds had been observed in North America since 1944.

Located at the crossroads of nowhere, these seasonally flooded, sludge-brown bottomlands where the Ghost Bird reputedly still roams is as confusing a place to paddle as you can imagine, known mostly to good ‘ol boys—hunters, fishers, trappers—who don’t seem to appreciate camera-toting birdwatchers in their fancy canoes and kayaks. So why would any sane paddler voluntarily enter this labyrinth, especially in the steamy summer months when the heat index can easily top 135 brain-scrambling degrees, when the serpentine green mazes turn into dry, dead-end chutes, and when the mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and deadly cottonmouth water moccasins are as thick as fleas on a coon dog? Because, as I discovered during my Quixotic quests when searching for America’s rarest bird, these deliciously unfamiliar, ill-begotten, yet subtly beautiful bayous, even at their vilest, are rather fun to explore by canoe in a masochistic man-on-a-mission kind of way. –Larry Rice